One of my favourite Cretan foods is antikristo, and I should probably admit at the outset that my interest in it is not entirely academic. Put a plate of properly cooked lamb in front of me, browned at the edges, still succulent beneath, with bread, a village salad and a glass of red wine within reach, and my commitment to detached historical enquiry deteriorates rather rapidly.

I had eaten antikristo many times before I stopped to consider what the word actually meant. It was simply one of those Cretan things that had become familiar through living here. Then, one evening, I noticed it translated into English as “mirrored lamb.”

Mirrored Lamb

There are moments when translation illuminates a culture, and others when it leaves you staring at a menu wondering what offence the sheep had committed to deserve such treatment.

The Greek is αντικριστό — antikristo. Facing, opposite, set across from. And once you have watched it being prepared, the name makes perfect sense. Great pieces of lamb or goat are fixed around an open wood fire, not dangling over the flames but standing back from them, facing the heat. Fire in the middle, meat around it, and somebody who knows what he is doing moving quietly between the two.

There is very little fuss.

Salt.

Meat.

Wood.

Fire.

And knowledge.

That last ingredient is the one no menu can adequately describe.

The cook judges the fire, moves a piece a little nearer, turns another, perhaps adds wood and then leaves the whole arrangement alone. Fat begins to run. The edges darken. Smoke rises into the evening air. Nothing appears hurried because nothing can be hurried. Eventually the meat arrives at the table and conversation becomes temporarily less important.

It is easy at that point simply to eat it. I generally do.

But antikristo belongs to a much larger landscape, and it is a landscape I ride through every week.

Above the villages of Apokoronas the cultivated country gradually begins to loosen its grip. Olive groves thin out, the roads narrow, limestone pushes through the soil and the tracks become rougher. Goats appear where no sensible creature seems to have any business standing. Sheep occupy the road with the serene conviction that roads were invented primarily for sheep. The rider may possess hydraulic disc brakes, electric assistance and several thousand euros’ worth of German engineering, but none of these carries much authority with a Cretan ewe.

Eventually they move. Usually.

Beyond them are the tracks that lead towards the higher country and, beyond that, the great wall of the Lefká Óri. These are the routes I enjoy riding, but they were not made for me. Long before anyone invented an E-MTB, men and animals were moving through this country because there was work to be done.

There were animals to graze and water to find. There were sheepfolds and stone enclosures, cheese to make, paths between village and mountain, and the seasonal rhythms of pastoral life. Higher up stood the mitata, the stone shelters of the shepherding country, built not as picturesque curiosities for passing walkers and cyclists but because men working in the mountains needed shelter and somewhere to carry out the business of looking after animals and processing their milk.

Once you begin looking at the landscape in that way, antikristo no longer seems merely a method of cooking lamb.

It belongs here.

A shepherd in the mountains did not require a kitchen full of equipment. The essentials were already around him. There were animals, wood, open ground and fire. Salt could be carried. Everything else depended upon knowledge.

There is no need for a thermometer when generations of experience have taught you to read a fire.

That knowledge is difficult to date because it did not necessarily travel through books. It travelled through people. Someone watched his father. His father had watched another man before him. A boy carried wood, tended animals, stood beside the fire and learned without anybody announcing that a lesson had begun.

Cretans regard antikristo as one of their old pastoral traditions, and there is every reason to take that inheritance seriously. The pastoral culture from which it comes reaches deeply into the history of the island. The interesting question is not whether the tradition can be forced into a particular century, but how far we can follow it through the lives of Cretans, through written and material evidence and, most importantly, through the landscape in which it continues to make sense.

That makes the search more interesting rather than less. The purpose is to understand Cretan tradition: to listen to the people who inherited it, examine the landscape in which it developed and then see how the documentary and material evidence fits alongside what Cretans themselves say about it.

That means getting away from the books and back onto the bike.

I do not need to search for somewhere that still cooks antikristo traditionally. I already know several tavernas that do. I have watched the fires burning and the meat standing around them. The tradition has not vanished into the ethnographic record. It is alive, cooking away quite happily while historians decide what century to put it in.

The ride, therefore, is not a hunt for a lost custom.

It is a journey backwards from the plate.

Leave the taverna and follow the road towards the mountains. Leave the road and take the track. Follow the walls and the folds. Find the water. Look at where the animals graze and where the shepherds worked. Look at the mitata and then turn around and look back towards the villages.

The connections begin to reveal themselves.

A rough track is no longer merely an enjoyable descent. It connected people with grazing ground. A spring is not simply somewhere to refill a bottle. In dry mountain country it determined where animals could be kept and how ground could be used. A stone enclosure ceases to be another ruin passed at speed. It had a purpose.

Even the sheep blocking the road become evidence, although I shall try not to tell them. Their opinion of cyclists is already sufficiently low.

And somewhere along that chain — between animal, shepherd, mountain and village — somebody lit a fire.

Perhaps that is what I like most about antikristo. There is nothing elaborate hiding behind the name. It is an extraordinarily simple answer to an old practical problem: how to turn an animal into a meal when what you possess is meat, salt, wood, fire and experience.

Yet simplicity should not be confused with crudity. Anyone can light a fire. Cooking a large piece of lamb beside one without producing something resembling building material requires rather more judgement.

I have eaten the results often enough to appreciate the distinction.

So I will ride those old tracks again, although this time I shall look at them slightly differently. I will follow them from the villages towards the grazing country, past the walls, springs, folds and shepherds’ buildings, towards the country beneath the White Mountains. I will talk to the people who still cook antikristo and listen to what they were told by those who came before them.

The historical research can come afterwards.

The mountain should have the first word.

And eventually, with any luck, there will be a fire, a plate of lamb and a glass of wine.

Purely in the interests of field research, of course.